Controversial intellectual thinks that the war on Afghanistan by allied force is immoral and with no reason. He is known to make harsh statement against the US foreign policy and there is no surprise that this think tank has his opinion in this manner.

Matthew P. Hoh, a former U.S. combat marine captain and Department of Defense civilian in Iraq starting in 2004 and until September a political officer in the Foreign Service stationed in Afghanistan is giving some consternation to President Obama’s advisors as the Commander in Chief considers sending more soldiers to that war-torn country next to Pakistan.

Mr. Hoh wrote a letter of resignation to the State Department in September. His four page letter frames his doubts about what he said is the “why and to what end” behind “the strategic purposes of the United States’ presence in Afghanistan. He notes that like the Soviets’ nine year occupation, “we continue to secure and bolster a failing state, while encouraging an ideology and system of government unknown and unwanted by its people.”

Size matters. And it particularly matters when the size of the financial system grossly exceeds the productive capacity of the underlying economy. Then problems arise. Surplus capital flows into paper assets triggering a boom. Then speculators pile in driving asset prices higher. Margins grow, debts balloon, and bubbles emerge. The frenzy finally ends when the debts can no longer be serviced and the bubble begins to unwind, sometimes violently. As gas escapes; credit tightens, businesses are forced to cut back, asset prices plunge and unemployment soars. Deflation spreads to every sector. Eventually, the government steps in to rescue the financial system while the broader economy slumps into a coma.

The crisis that started two years ago, followed this same pattern. A meltdown in subprime mortgages sent the dominoes tumbling; the secondary market collapsed, and stock markets went into freefall. When Lehman Bros flopped, a sharp correction turned into a full-blown panic. Lehman tipped-off investors that that the entire multi-trillion dollar market for securitized loans was built on sand. Without price discovery, via conventional market transactions, no one knew what mortgage-backed securities (MBS) and other exotic debt-instruments were really worth. That sparked a global sell-off. Markets crashed. For a while, it looked like the whole system might collapse.

The Fed’s emergency intervention pulled the system back from the brink, but at great cost. Even now, the true value of the so-called toxic assets remains unknown. The Fed and Treasury have derailed attempts to create a public auction facility–like the Resolution Trust Corporation (RTC)–where prices can be determined and assets can be sold. Billions in toxic waste now clog the Fed’s balance sheet. Ultimately, the losses will be passed on to the taxpayer.

On Nov. 3, 2009, on Capitol Hill, activists from the “Coalition for Free Gaza March,” personally confronted Rep. Howard Berman (D-CA,) just outside his office over the Goldstone Report. The Congressman then quickly rushed towards his private elevator. Afterwards, six activists strolled into Room 2221, Rep. Bermans office, in the Rayburn Building, around 10 AM. There, they began reading the 575-paged UN Report of Judge Richard Goldstone. The Goldstone-authored document is highly critical of Israel’s recent military conduct in Gaza, labeling some of its action as “War Crimes.” Rep. Berman, who is Chair of the Committee on Foreign Affairs, has introduced HR 867 in the House. Its purpose is to reject the report of the distinguished jurist, without giving Judge Goldstone a chance to personally testify before the Congress on his findings. HR 867 is due for a vote in the House later today. See, http://codepinkalert.org/article.php?… andhttp://www.thepeoplesvoice.org/TPV3/V… andhttp://www.miftah.org/Display.cfm?Doc… and http://www.juancole.com/2009/09/golds… and http://www.boomantribune.com/?op=disp… andhttp://www.afterdowningstreet.org/nod…

Friends, skeptics, countrymen, lend me your ears – but not brickabats. I come not to praise vile, crony capitalism, that unholy offspring of influence peddling, corporate welfare, regulatory stupor, and oversized subsidies making big, bad banks even bigger and badder. “Too big to fail” is now “too big to lend,” thus too big to help millions of paying “customers.” If it weren’t tragic, it would be farce. Rarely have so many trillions done so much for so undeserving an elite – all by design, in support of the status quo. Feh!

Conscious or karmic capitalism takes much longer term views of “profitability,” vs. rigged, quarterly charades, judging non-sustainable enterprise as bad for everyone, including investors. Obeying Warren Buffett’s dictum, plan to own companies for a century, these visionaries prize relationships (with customers, vendors, employees), brand loyalty, corporate culture, intellectual capital, and low environmental impact. Their motivation, whatever positives accrue, is not selflessness, but forging stronger links between the reality of self-interest and the mandate of community public interest.

‘Help Wake up the American public before the water gets too hot to climb out of the pot’

My congratulations to Sibel Edmonds on the launch of “Boiling Frogs”! At a time when most mainstream news organizations are constantly following the beat of the same few drummers, there is a critical need for independent, alternative, and new media to expand the boundaries of thought. For nearly a decade, Sibel has fought against excessive government secrecy, built up an organization of more than one hundred national security whistleblowers, and exposed government attempts to cover-up abuses.

The idea that Osama bin Laden was responsible for the 9/11 attacks has been an article of faith for public officials and the mainstream media. Calling it an “article of faith” points to two features of this idea. On the one hand, no one in these circles publicly challenges this idea.

On the other hand, as I pointed out at length in two of my books – 9/11 Contradictions1 and The New Pearl Harbor Revisited,2 no good evidence has ever been publicly presented to support it.

Colin Powell’s Withdrawn Promise Two weeks after 9/11, Secretary of State Colin Powell, speaking to Tim Russert on Meet the Press, said that he expected “in the near future . . . to put out . . . a document that will describe quite clearly the evidence that we have linking [bin Laden] to this attack.”3

Powell reversed himself, however, at a press conference with President Bush in the White House Rose Garden the next morning, saying that, although the government had information that left no question of bin Laden’s responsibility, “most of it is classified.”4 According to Seymour Hersh, citing officials from both the CIA and the Department of Justice, the real reason for the reversal was a “lack of solid information.”5

Unlike any other Catholic writer at the time, Dorothy Day saw Adolf Hitler’s emerging policy toward the Jews as a moral problem for Catholics. She saw this while Hitler was still only the chancellor in a multiparty cabinet—two years before he combined the office of chancellor and president to become Führer and almost four years before Germany adopted the Nuremburg Laws that stripped German Jews of their citizenship and human rights. Day’s views are expressed in this previously unknown essay, which lay undetected in a correspondence file in the Dorothy Day-Catholic Worker Collection at Marquette University.

[…]

A Jew came into the office of The Catholic Worker the other day and sat around and read for a while. He nosed through Cahill’s Christian State and condemned it for its anti-Semitism. Then he looked at a missal for a while and hummed through some of the Gregorian plain chant.

Even though Barack Obama, the candidate, pledged to end “the practice of shipping away prisoners in the dead of night to be tortured in far-off countries,” his FBI has been rendering kidnap victims to the U.S. The practice is still kidnapping, however; and it’s still illegal.

Unlucky victim No. 1 was Raymond Azar, 45, flown from Afghanistan to Alexandria, Va., not to a foreign country. The construction manager for Sima International, a Lebanese outfit that did work for the U.S. military, Azar said he was tortured by his abductors. He might just as well have been flow to Egypt under the Bushies.

Top American intellectual sees no significant change of US foreign policy under Obama

As civilised people across the world breathed a sigh of relief to see the back of former US president George W. Bush, top American intellectual Noam Chomsky warned against assuming or expecting significant changes in the basis of Washington’s foreign policy under President Barack Obama.

Following US geo-strategy in what Brzezinski termed the “global Balkans,” the US government has worked closely with major NGOs to “promote democracy” and “freedom” in former Soviet republics, playing a role behind the scenes in fomenting what are termed “colour revolutions,” which install US and Western-friendly puppet leaders to advance the interests of the West, both economically and strategically.

Part 2 of this essay on “The Origins of World War III” analyzes the colour revolutions as being a key stratagem in imposing the US-led New World Order. The “colour revolution” or “soft” revolution strategy is a covert political tactic of expanding NATO and US influence to the borders of Russia and even China; following in line with one of the primary aims of US strategy in the New World Order: to contain China and Russia and prevent the rise of any challenge to US power in the region.

A police checkpoint just outside Lahore, and a bank near the army’s headquarters in Rawalpindi, are the latest targets of bombers in Pakistan. Both attacks are thought to be the work of the Taliban, in retaliation for the army’s ongoing offensive in South Waziristan. The fighting has pushed the UN to withdraw non-essential staff from tribal areas, near the Afghan border. Al Jazeera’s Imran Khan has more.

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The Senate voted to save net neutrality. Now we need the House of Representatives to do the same, or else the FCC will let ISPs like Comcast and Verizon ruin the internet with throttling, censorship and unnecessary fees. Click the image below to write to Congress.

The Golden Rule

“That which is hateful to you do not do to another ... the rest (of the Torah) is all commentary, now go study.” - Rabbi Hillel

Amendment I

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

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